Ghosts and Gardens
by brightstarff
Summary: Based on the AU prompt from tumblr: "Sometimes I steal flowers from your garden on my way to the cemetery, but today you've caught me and have demanded to come with me to make sure the "girl is pretty enough to warrant flower theft" and I'm trying to figure out how to break it to you that we're on our way to a graveyard."


_A/N: I posted this on AO3 a while ago, and I just realized I never posted this here. Prompt from awful-aus on tumblr._

* * *

Sometimes, Asami doesn't buy flowers ahead of time. Each week, she always convinces herself that maybe, she won't go this week. That this will be the week she moves on and the past stops haunting her around street corners, under the hazy lights of the city, in her dreams. But Friday evenings she often finds herself tired of being cramped in the tiny walls of her office or even the thick atmosphere of the warehouse, so she walks home.

And, inevitably, her feet trace a familiar path.

Sometimes, then, she finds herself a block away, her hands uncomfortably empty. Once, she went to the graveyard anyway without flowers, her palms clenched around invisible stems, and she left feeling heavier than before. She's realized, since, that leaving the flowers lets her leave a piece of the heavy burden behind-a half, and then a half of a half, and then a half of a half of a half, continuously smaller pieces that never quite disappear but slowly become lighter and lighter.

So when she finds herself on that familiar block, with rows of neat houses with square little plots of land, and she hasn't bought flowers that week because she nearly convinced herself she didn't need to go, it's almost too easy to just...borrow a few.

One house in particular has vibrant flowers, red and pink and even blue and white all coexisting peacefully in the front yard. The scent had attracted her initially. The house has the smallest plot of land to work with, but the owner tilled the entire yard and filled it with teeming color. Asami was drawn to it instantly, inexplicably (or maybe she just doesn't want to think about how much a person has done with so little space, when she feels she has done so little with so much, and her chest is as empty as her hands).

She always has a knife on her, so she makes quick, neat, diagonal cuts across the stems. Sometimes she chooses all one color, sometimes she mixes them together. The color choice ebbs and flows with her moods, and she finds the days she cries are the days she picks the most vibrant blue. Asami feels a bit guilty at her occasional thieving, but the owner never seems to miss the few flowers that she takes, and somehow new ones quickly take their place. Some part of her is envious at how easily the gardener creates new life.

She assumes the owner must work late on Friday evenings, and she never sees them.

The first day she does, it's a pink and red day. She's feeling generally pleased after a successful new design, and she's drawn to the energetic tulips winking at her from the front corner of the garden. She leans over a black fence that comes up to her waist and snips a few of the bulbs off.

As she stands up, a soft noise catches her attention. She looks up and barely manages to hold onto the flower stems.

In the doorway of the house is a beautiful young woman casually leaning against the doorjamb, and even at this distance Asami can see her blue eyes nearly hum with intensity. They seem to match the blue hydrangea. (Eventually, Asami will no longer be able to associate blue with crying days.)

She opens her mouth to stutter out anything, or some sort of apology, but then the woman starts to laugh.

"I was wondering who kept stealing my favorite flowers."

Finally finding her voice, Asami blurts out, "Oh, I'm so sorry, I-" She stops, though, and frowns, unable to convey precisely what has led her to steal flowers somewhat regularly. There's no easy way to convey the last few years of her life, no way to explain that color has been lacking from it for so long, no way to explain that they somehow made it easier for her to leave the graveyard without becoming a ghost herself.

The other woman stares at her for a moment and Asami begins to think that she's not really mad, because her mouth is quirked up at one corner. Then she pushes away from the doorway and closes the door behind her with an easy motion, and Asami senses a strength, there, a muscularity, and she feels her palm inexplicably grow warm around the flowers and her knife. She hastily pockets the sharp object before it slips out of her hand.

The gardener stops near the gate and she leans on it, and Asami can't help but follow the graceful line of her hands and forearm.

(Asami has not _looked_ at another person in months, maybe even years, and it feels like she's both drowning and parched all at once.)

"Well," the gardener says, looking at the tulips in Asami's hands before glancing up into her eyes, "If you want to make it up to me, just let me meet the lucky lady."

 _What?_

Asami's expression must have echoed her thoughts, because the mysterious woman laughs before unlatching the gate. She steps through it and then Asami feels her brain turn to white noise, completely confused at the turn of events.

"You have to be picking those for someone. And red and pink...I'd just like to see who's pretty enough to warrant flower theft." Her mouth is still tilted up at the corner, and Asami is too overwhelmed by the sudden turning of her routine onto its head to say anything. Numbly, she simply turns and begins to walk. The other woman seems to take it as an invitation and she follows her.

Jogging to catch up to her slightly longer stride, the other woman says, "Korra, by the way."

"Uh..." Oh, her name. Right. "Asami." (She has not felt so inarticulate since her first board meeting after her father's death, and this time, the words are stopped in her throat by the vibrancy of blue eyes.)

They walk for a moment in nearly companionable silence, or at least Korra does while Asami feels a wordless tide of confusion and panic seep over her.

There is no "lucky lady." There is only a freshly dug patch of ground, still unseeded, and two grim, lifeless headstones, bare and minimal and unyielding. Not energetic like the person beside her, whose entire being from the top of her head to her eyes to her strong hands radiates life and newness.

(Asami wondered, before that day, if she had turned into hard and lifeless stone, too.)

She has no idea how to convey that to Korra without the other woman simply leaving awkwardly, and Asami finds she doesn't want her to.

Because as much as she hasn't _looked_ at anyone, really, in the past who-knows-how-long, no one has really looked at her, either. They've maybe found the specter of grief too difficult to encounter face to face or eye to eye, or maybe they saw her simply as a proxy for her mother, or father, or both. But never Asami.

But once the other woman knows where she's going, she'll probably leave to avoid the same thing, and since they're entirely strangers, Asami wouldn't blame her.

Still, she steels herself for the inevitable. They chat a little on the way, Asami vaguely mentioning she works in engineering (not that she's the CEO of the largest civil engineering and technological company in the city, if not the world) and the other woman talking about her job as a landscaper (which, of course, makes perfect sense, and explains the toned shoulders displayed by her sleeveless shirt and the calm strength of her hands).

Then they cross the street, and they are at the gate, and Asami knows that her little respite from the routine of her life will have to end. "Well, this is my stop," Asami says in a half-hearted attempt at humor, and Korra looks confused until she glances over Asami's shoulder at the graveyard, then at the sheepish and uncertain look at her face, and then Korra slaps her forehead. Asami jumps a little at the motion and the sound.

"Of course! I didn't realize-I should have, since I live so close-I'm so sorry-" The other woman's calm confidence has faded into an incoherent string of words and gestures.

And, for the first time in years, Asami laughs. Really laughs, until she's wheezing and tears are leaking out from her eyes and she probably looks horrible right now, but she can't find it in herself to care. Instead of Asami apologizing to Korra, and Korra being angry, they're standing outside the graveyard where her parents are buried and Korra is apologizing to her. She knows Korra's staring, probably confused, and she manages to breathe slowly enough to stop the desperate clenching of her stomach, as if her whole body is trying to remind her _you're alive, you're alive._

"You're beautiful when you laugh."

The statement startles the young CEO into silence, and then Korra turns a pleasant red, highlighting her cheekbones in the evening light.

Asami feels herself smiling, though, and she says, "I'm going to place these beautiful flowers I came across down." A wild impulse takes over her. "And then, maybe, we could-ah..." She trails off, realizing it's too late to really go for coffee and dinner would be a bit odd since they barely knew each other.

Korra smiles, though, and says, "I'd love to." Somehow it doesn't matter what it is they're agreeing to do, and Asami gestures for Korra to follow, and they walk into the cemetery together.

When Asami leaves the cemetery that day, the sky has turned blue, and pink, and red, and for once, the sunset doesn't feel like an ending.

 _You're alive._


End file.
